I always start off by going to 'The Monastery Gates' followed by the newest nodes section. I prefer it that way around as although newest nodes contains a lot of information, you have to explore further in order to find out articles that you want to read. The Monastery Gates provides a nice easy interface to ease into the site with, that its easy to skim and see if you want to delve deeper.

In some respects, it might be nice if you had a page which was a mixture of the random node and the newest nodes pages. I guess it would be a sort of a snapshot page, with random entries expanded, giving you a quick view of what kind of discussions are going on today. Just a random thought.